The NSW Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia (SSAI-NSW) is planning to co-ordinate a series of seminars with a research focus that will be viewable on the Internet via Access GRID Rooms and software that can be installed on personal computers such as EVO. Information on how to see and participate in the workshops is available here.
The first seminar will be presented on Tuesday 8th May at 3pm from the Macquarie University GRID Room. The speaker will be Professor Peter Diggle, Faculty of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University and Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, University of Liverpool. His title is Partial likelihood analysis of spatio-temporal processes.
Peter J Diggle
Faculty of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University and Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, University of Liverpool
The likelihood function associated with a statistical model is key to principled statistical inference, whether Bayesian or classical, but for most of the statistical models used to analyse spatio-temporal phenomena the likelihood function is analytically intractable. For this reason, spatial-temporal model-fitting often uses either ad hoc estimation methods or computationally intensive Monte Carlo methods that require careful tuning to each application.
Partial likelihood was proposed by Sir David Cox in 1972, in a famous paper that introduced the now very widely used class of proportional hazards models for survival data.
In this talk, I will first make some general comments on the role of statistical modelling, contrasting empirical and mechanistic modelling strategies. I will then describe an adaptation of the Cox partial likelihood method to spatio-temporal modelling and show how it can be more tractable than the full likelihood as a basis for inference.
Finally, I will describe three applications: the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in Cumbria, UK, during the 2001 epidemic; the nesting pattern of a colony of Arctic terns; the early phase of the 2009 swine 'flu epidemic in the West Midlands, UK